


the greatest act of love

by youaremarvelous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blow Jobs, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Unrequited Crush, past jeith, present sheith, rip james
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 08:16:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15926468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youaremarvelous/pseuds/youaremarvelous
Summary: James hates Keith. He hates that he’d ever entertained the notion that they could be something more than each other’s outlet.He hates that he’d never gotten the chance.He’s got it bad. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him, but Kinkade does in the showers that night. Not with words, but with the judgmental arch of his eyebrows when James leans down to pull off his socks and accidentally presses his bare ass against Keith’s. Any embarrassment he’s ever felt towards public nudity has been long-buried beneath the struggle to defend the earth and what that necessitates, but, as it turns out, an accidental moon landing with his misguided past crush turned sexual awakening is the limit to James’ composure.Rizavi will later report that she heard his shriek from the women’s showers. She’s never one to lose an opportunity to rib him, but secretly James believes her. Before that moment, he wasn’t aware his voice was capable of reaching that high an octave.“I guess that’s why they tell you not to drop the soap,” the Holt boy comments. “You peeled out so fast I think you left skid marks.”





	the greatest act of love

James hates Keith. 

 

He hates how effortlessly he eats up all of his records, he hates his cliché bad boy attitude, he hates the thick, dark eyebrows that push to converge over his nose and how he still looks so stupidly handsome, anyway.

 

The last time James saw Keith was through a one-way mirrored office window. He was a clash of bruised knuckles and wild eyes, a look of pain so naked that James nearly dropped the files he was delivering. But his memory dwells on the time before that. Keith’s tight ass in his lap, his fingernails clenched unapologetically into James’ shoulders, eyes dark while he rides him, hard and heavy and dangerous. 

 

James remembers it with his dick in his hand, his forehead pushed against the shower wall.

 

He hates Keith. He hates that he’d ever entertained the notion that they could be something more than each other’s outlet. 

 

He hates that he’d never gotten the chance.   

 

Keith disappears into the desert on a nondescript Tuesday during flight sims, and James moves on with his life. He takes up the mantle as the top of his class and pretends the victory of it isn’t hollow. He starts courting a pretty blonde just vanilla and white-collar enough to impress his parents. He’s finally begun to fool himself that Keith was never a significant part of his life when he’s dropped back into it, filled out, a generous handful of inches taller, and calm in a way he never was as a student. Like he’s been poured into this new body, combustible anger digested by the algid maw of space. 

 

The reunion isn’t how James had fantasized. Namely, Keith isn’t pushed against a wall while James pounds into him, fingers grasped in Keith’s overlong hair, punishing his sweet spot with relentless vigor until his name falls from Keith’s lips like a hymn. They have a debriefing to attend so they don’t have time to talk. They don’t have time for anything.

 

But James feels Keith’s presence like a pebble in his shoe. He can’t stop thinking about him. Keith’s broad shoulders. His slender waist. The new scar that only seems to emphasize the sharp line of his jaw and the discovery of a gentle smile

 

Only Keith could get pulled into an intergalactic war and come out with polished edges. Or maybe he changed out of spite, to prove that fighting for peace against world conquering aliens was still better than whatever his life constituted before. James recalls the hours of extra practice he and his fellow students were subjected to as a result of Keith’s inability to let anyone in a position of authority have the last word and decides he wouldn’t put it past him. 

 

“Hey,” James calls out lamely, desperately, the first time he encounters him alone in the hall.

 

Keith’s bent in front of the vending machine. He offers a half-aborted wave and starts to rifle around in his pocket for change as if he hadn’t just been eyeing the lock for the easiest way to break it. It’s a glimmer of the old him, the smart-mouthed 80’s-styled bad boy that had existed before giant robots and MFE fighters and uncharacteristic tender gazes. James feels the slow rotation of the earth begin to right itself under his feet. He rolls his eyes and meanders towards Keith. Casually, like his presence hasn’t burned up every trace of James’ rational thought and taken up residence in the ash-ridden carnage. 

 

“Don’t act like you’re gonna pay on my account.”

 

“Cadet Griffin.” Keith tips his chin in acknowledgment. “Maybe I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

 

“Officer,” James corrects automatically. “The day you stop stealing from these things is the day I start suspecting you were replaced by an evil clone.” James folds his arms over his chest and leans a shoulder on the corner of the vending machine. “Or whatever alignment not ripping off junk food conglomerates falls under.”

 

Keith laughs, but it’s joyless. “That’s more likely than you might think.”

 

“I’ve been defending our base against alien fleets for the past year. Clones are pretty high on the list of believability.”

 

“Right,” Keith says, distant as an echo. Silence settles just long enough for James to start worrying he’s about to be the unwitting audience to a dramatic space war monologue. He can already hear the swelling synth beats to a lovelorn 80’s classic when Keith stuffs his hands in his pockets and kicks the corner of the vending machine. “You’d think they’d’ve updated these rust buckets by now. They’re way too easy to break into.”  

 

“Yeah, well, all the Milky Ways stopped mysteriously disappearing once you left so I guess nobody saw the need,” James says. “And I don’t know if you noticed, but the Garrison’s time and funding has been a little tied up in recent years.” He plunks a couple quarters into the machine. “On me,” he says when Keith doesn’t move to make a selection. 

 

“Oh. Uh, thanks.” Keith smiles at him, and it’s sun-warmed. The first concentrated rays of light piercing through a summer storm. James rakes his memory for any other time Keith has smiled at him, for anytime he’s seen him smile at all.

 

Keith makes his selection. A Milky Way, predictably. He’s nearing six feet of compact muscle and dangerously long limbs, but watching him peel back the wrapper of a candy bar transports James to five years prior. Hating Keith, hating how he can’t help but notice every little thing about him. He’d been hellbent on exposing Keith’s penchant for Milky Ways as an aesthetic choice, but in the end, he’d started slipping miniature versions into his backpack just for a glimpse of the contented face he made when he ate them. It became his own fix, Keith his own unhealthy addiction. 

 

Even now he can’t pull his eyes away when Keith takes a bite. The candy tastes like nothing but sugar and empty calories to James’ tongue, but Keith closes his eyes and visibly relaxes. 

 

“Hey.” Keith swallows, drags a hand through his hair. “Look—”

 

“Can it, Kogane,” James says. “The past is the past. We have bigger fish to fry now.”

 

This close James can make out the knob of Keith’s Adam’s apple bobbing, carved like blue-veined marble in the harsh fluorescents. He imagines how it would feel to scrape his teeth across it, then stuffs the thought away like the magazines he hid under his bed when he was thirteen and panicking over his sexuality.    

 

“Yeah.” Keith nods. “I agree. So...no hard feelings?”

 

It’s a guarantee James can’t make. Keith has historically inspired nothing but hard feelings in him, physically and otherwise. He holds a hand out, anyway. “Sure.”

 

Keith grasps it without hesitation and smiles again. There’s chocolate smeared across his front tooth and James hates that he thinks about cleaning it with his tongue.

 

He’s got it bad. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him, but Kinkade does in the showers that night. Not with words, but with the judgmental arch of his eyebrows when James leans down to pull off his socks and accidentally presses his bare ass against Keith’s. Any embarrassment he’s ever felt towards public nudity has been long-buried beneath the struggle to defend the earth and what that necessitates, but, as it turns out, an accidental moon landing with his misguided past crush turned sexual awakening is the limit to James’ composure.

 

Rizavi will later report that she heard his shriek from the women’s showers. She’s never one to lose an opportunity to rib him, but secretly James believes her. Before that moment, he wasn’t aware his voice was capable of reaching that high an octave. The sound of it is alien to his own ears—skipping across the linoleum tiles, a tribute to his humiliation, ringing in pace with his heart.

 

“I guess that’s why they tell you not to drop the soap,” the Holt boy comments. “You peeled out so fast I think you left skid marks.”

 

Everyone chuckles. Everyone but Keith. 

 

If James had to pick a worst case scenario, it’d be for Keith to recoil in disgust, maybe roll his eyes like he would’ve when he was 15 and five feet of concentrated teen angst. Instead, he doesn’t even notice, too engrossed with helping Shiro unbutton his sleeve cuff to even acknowledge the accidental ass to ass contact. 

 

Somehow, his indifference is worse. 

 

“Stop it,” Rizavi tosses a muffin at James’ head during breakfast the next morning.

 

“Stop what?” James asks, affronted. 

 

“Sizing up Keith like he’s on the menu.”

 

“I’m not!” 

 

Leifsdottir places the lost muffin on a napkin and Kinkade picks it up and takes a bite. Neither says a word, but they stare at James as though seeing right through him.  

 

James sighs and leans his head in his hand. Two tables over he sees Shiro thumb a smear of butter on Keith’s nose and Keith laugh and rest his hand on Shiro’s thigh. “Do you think he and Shirogane are together?”

 

“Shiro?” Rizavi wrinkles her nose and glances over her shoulder. “I thought I heard that Keith and Lance were a thing?”

 

“Lance has a crush on the princess,” Kinkade says. Three pairs of eyes blink in his direction, and he shrugs and takes another bite of muffin. “He’s a long-range specialist. We trained. And talked.”   

 

Rizavi breathes out a long “oh.” “Well, that explains why Shiro and Keith were holding hands under the table during district debriefing. Morcos swore up and down Shiro was his adoptive dad.” 

 

James balks. “They’re like five years apart.”

 

“Four,” Leifsdottir corrects.

 

Rizavi tips her head and spears a sausage link. “She said she heard Keith calling Shiro ‘Daddy.’”

 

“You’re making that up,” James says flatly. 

 

Rizavi screws her face into a poor approximation of innocence. “What’s with the obsession, anyway?” She points her fork at James. “I thought you two don’t get along.”

 

“We don’t.”

 

“Mmhmm,” Rizavi hums and bites the sausage in half. The skin snaps between her teeth.

 

“My concerns are strictly professional. Team leader to team leader.”

 

Rizavi lowers her eyelids. Her glasses slide to the end of her nose as if sentient and expressing the unimpressed will of their wearer. “You’re not our leader.”

 

“I vote Veronica for team leader,” Leifsdottir says.

 

“Seconded,” Kinkade agrees, never lifting his eyes from his eggs. 

 

“Oh!” Rizavi claps her hands together, “Yes!” She turns back to James with a tilted smile, drunk off her win, three MFE pilots against one lovesick loser. “You can be the leader of unrequited crushes.”

 

“ _ Okay _ .” James raises his palm in surrender. “My point is none of us can afford to be distracted by romantic pursuits with the Galra breathing down our necks.”

 

A loaded silence settles over them like a lid. It’s not a point any of them can rightfully argue, but it’s not one they can steep in, either. They joke and they muck around and they harbor unfortunate crushes, and as much as any of those things might not be strictly appropriate considering the gravity of their situation, time is a limited resource and they can’t spend whatever’s left of it staring at the sky waiting for it to fall.

 

Their table chatter hollows out into the ambient noise of the cafeteria—silverware scraping plates, chalky laughter. James can hear the click of his own throat in his ears when he swallows, dry because that’s what thinking about Keith does to him. He cracks his knuckles in his lap, rakes his brain for any way to pull the mood back from the ledge. 

 

His eyes find the back of Keith’s head—unconsciously—like Keith has his own gravitational pull with James as its sole victim. He’s got his hair pulled into a messy ponytail today. The wispy baby hairs curl against his nape, a precious slice of milky skin James only ever managed to glimpse when he’d sat behind Keith in class the semester before the Kerberos failure and Keith’s sudden exodus. 

 

The sight is so rare he loses himself to it, free falling into a memory of tipping pens off the edge of his desk, biting the inside of his cheek between his teeth the few times Keith would actually bend to retrieve it, heart fluttering in his throat when he’d glare at him, instead.  

 

“Earth to Griff.” Rizavi flicks a crumb at him. She swivels around in her seat to follow James’ line of sight at the same moment Keith and Shiro stand and head towards the exit. James starts to tell her to turn around, to preserve the illusion that he and his fellow officers haven’t been gossiping over something as meaningless as relationships for the duration of breakfast, but the words tangle on his tongue when she raises half out of her seat and throws a hand in the air.

 

“What are you doing?” James whisper yells.

 

Rizavi looks at him with pity, like the answer is obvious. “I thought you wanted to know if they’re together,” she says. “What better way to find out than to ask?”  

 

“Rizavi,” James warns, leaning across the table to pull her arm down. “Don’t.”

 

Shiro and Keith draw near, unwittingly counting down the moment of James’ death with every step. Rizavi inhales audibly. To James, it’s like the sound of a gun cocking. 

 

“Morning!” She calls with a casual wave. Just that, a greeting. James wilts into his seat, so distracted by pulsing relief he elbows a glass of apple juice into his lap. He mentally weighs the cost of his dignity against soggy, fruity-smelling briefs.  

 

Keith turns to them, surprise scrawled into his eyes, the story of his life before. Always on the defensive, always ready for the next fight. “Morning,” he replies with a faint nod, a soft smile. 

 

James had forgotten how graveled Keith’s voice could sound, like he’d just given someone the best head of their life. He sees the way Keith looks back at Shiro—like his path is paved in the light of his eyes—and wonders if he hasn’t. 

 

Risavi sits back and straightens her glasses. “Not my type, but I gotta say, I get it. He’s pretty cute. Not worth wetting your pants over, but…” She peers under the table, snickers at the golden puddle on the floor. 

 

James pats at his lap with a wad of napkins, the fight all but drained out of him. She’s right, anyway. Keith is cute. He always was, but lately, it’s been catching James by surprise. Keith’s wistful brow, his tightly coiled muscle, his eyes, blue as the hottest part of a flame and every bit as hypnotic. It didn’t matter if James hadn’t seen him for a day or an hour, any amount of absence sharpened the blade of Keith’s beauty. His presence was fatal every time.  

 

It can’t go on like this, James decides that night, lying in bed, toes curled and calves clenched. He’d been staring at the dark ceiling since lights out, honing in on the ambient sounds of sleep-breathing around him, trying to convince his brain that masturbating in a toilet stall is inappropriate at best, public indecency at worst.

 

He conjures his mother, her thin-lipped look of disapproval, manipulating his moral scale forever in her favor. The illusion is strong for the regularity with which he’s fallen victim to it, but Keith bubbles through like oil in water. 

 

James can only press a palm over his eyes because of course he does. Keith was a middle finger in the face of authority. He was a sloppy handjob in the janitor’s closet blatantly on the heels of Shiro announcing his intention to propose to Adam. He wasn’t susceptible to the influence of peer pressure. Public opinion of right and wrong could never restrain him.

 

As much as James doesn’t want to cast himself the lovesick sheltered princess to Keith’s rebel without a cause, he can’t deny that brand of easy defiance as part of his appeal.

 

In the end, nature wins out over manners. Or at the very least, untameable horniness does. He won’t be able to act with full mental capacity if he’s sleep deprived, James reasons. He rises from his cot slowly—hyper-aware of every telltale mattress creak—and tiptoes around beds like a kid sneaking to the kitchen for a midnight snack. 

 

The bathroom is blessedly empty when he reaches it. James situates himself in the second to last stall after a brief mental battle weighing the relative privacy and legroom of the handicap stall versus the lurking guilt that a person with an actual disability and not just a disabling crush might need to use it for its intended purpose.

 

James drops trow and works fast. He leans his head against the partition wall, dips into his mental bank of Keith’s back dimples pooled with amber lamplight, his heady taste in James’ mouth, and grasps his hand around his dick, stroking hard. 

 

He’s close to climax—his lower belly coiling hot, tension curling in his toes—when the squeak of an opened door breaches through the thick, pre-orgasm haze. James acts on instinct. He jerks his feet up to the toilet lid and slaps a hand over his mouth to mute his heaving breaths.  

 

Silence swallows him, pulsing like the boiling hot dick clenched in his fist. James has almost convinced himself it was a trick of the building settling, maybe an old creaky pipe, when a familiar voice cuts through the quiet.

 

“I think we’re good.” 

 

“You think?”

 

“I checked under the stalls. We’re alone.”

 

And now more than ever James is convinced of the universe’s vendetta against him because it’s Shiro and Keith. 

 

Of fucking course it is.

 

James leans his head back and draws on every inch of tactical training to devise a plan to get out of this. The hard-on complicates matters. Somehow, rock hard erections never came up in class as a potential impeding factor when escaping enemy territory.  

 

“You alright?” Shiro’s voice is deep and unfamiliar, intimate in a way James has never heard. Presumably, because he was never meant to.

 

“Fine. Worried about you,” Keith says. James just barely holds back the scream building in the back of his throat. “You’re pushing yourself for Sam.”

 

“I’m not.”

 

“Shiro.”

 

There’s a fond sigh, then silence. The Shiro in James’ mind traces the pink scar on Keith’s cheek with his thumb. James has never hated his innate ability to accurately visualize his surroundings more than in that moment.  

 

“Maybe I am. I’ll be careful, okay?”

 

Keith doesn’t respond, but he must indicate his answer somehow because the argument is dropped. James guesses they know each other well enough that words aren’t crucial to communication. It’d be sweet if it was anyone else. 

 

“I saw you and Iverson playing fetch with Kosmo,” Shiro says after a while. 

 

“He’s a good guy once you get to know him.”

 

“Sounds like someone else I know.”

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Keith says. He’s amused, seemingly understanding the punchline to a joke Shiro never told. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I guess I’m glad we ended up back here. A lot’s changed.”

 

“You’ve changed.”

 

“My feelings for you haven’t.”

 

James digs half-moons into his thighs. This isn’t Keith. At least, it’s not the Keith he knows.

 

The Keith he knows is snarky comments and a perpetual scowl. He’s unapologetically rough sex in dark lit rooms, not tender conversations and loaded glances. 

 

Maybe it’s like Shiro said and he’s changed, or maybe this is who Keith was all along and James just never cared enough to know it. The composition of their relationship—or whatever they had back then—had hinged on their own wants, their own needs. Keith needed an outlet for his unrequited feelings and James needed a way to believe he was more than the straightlaced perfect soldier his parents had raised him to be.  

 

He hadn't dared to fool himself that their entanglement meant more than its capacity as an escape, but it never felt as hollow as in this moment.

 

There’s silence again, and James doesn’t feel good about it. He feels even less good about it when the silence dissolves into the wet smack of a less-than-chaste kiss and the slow, unmistakable grumble of a zipper being dragged down. 

 

“Easy,” Shiro’s voice is rough, breathless. For a blissful, naive moment, James lets himself believe that Shiro will be the voice of reason. That he’ll pump the brakes on the sexual exploits, or pull them into a stall at the very least. Hell, even the handicap stall would be an acceptable option at this point. 

 

Unfortunately for James, the universe hates him. Knees hit the floor like the clap of a starter pistol and James’ memory is flooded with rumors of the Shiro who existed before his well-known status as number one Galaxy Garrison poster boy. The Shiro who smuggled beer on campus via travel mugs over the course of a week for a secret makeshift keg party. The Shiro who devised a plan for hijacking hoverbike keys from Commander Iverson’s office for late night drag racing. 

 

The Shiro who would give someone a blowjob in a public bathroom when the entirety of the earth’s remaining free occupants were asleep in the gymnasium right on the other side of the door. 

 

James buries his eyes in his knees and clamps his palms over his ears. The whole ordeal shaves at least a solid handful of years from his life. This is how supervillains are born, he thinks. By being held captive for a past flame and childhood idol’s intimate encounter with no other recourse than to will his heartbeat to drown out the sound of Keith’s cock hitting the back of Shiro’s throat.

 

If he gets hard again, he can’t be held responsible. 

 

If he spite-cranks himself to completion after they leave, he can’t be held responsible for that, either.  

 

When he stumbles out—jelly-limbed and with a significantly depleted will to live—there’s the faint impression of a backward ‘get over him’ inscribed across his cheek, transferred from the partition wall to his face with sweat.

 

A message delivered by karma. Duly noted. 

 

He drops his elbows on the porcelain sink and grips his fingers in his hair. Voltron isn’t the universe’s greatest weapon, he decides. That title can only rightfully belong to Shiro and Keith. 

“Where were you?” Leifsdottir whispers when James finds his way back to bed.

 

James lowers himself on his cot, grateful for the dark and the way it cloaks his post-orgasm flush. “Bathroom.”

 

“For eighteen minutes?”

 

James fights back the urge to ask if that’s all. It was nearer to an eternity by his generous estimation. “You counted?”

 

Leifsdottir shrugs. “I couldn’t sleep.”

 

James hums his understanding. He stretches himself into his bed, his thoughts into the corners of the crowded gym. “Keith and Shiro are dating,” he tells the ceiling, the taste of it stale on his tongue. The statement isn’t really aimed at anyone, but Leifsdottir responds.

 

“It would seem so, yes.”

 

James closes his eyes and imagines there are stars over his head instead of pendant lights and metal rafters. He imagines there is a world in which he has left as much of an impression on Keith as Keith has left on him.

 

The stages of grief are meant to unravel over the course of months, even years. For James, it takes days. 

 

Denial was a gift stolen the moment he was cast as an unwitting audience to Shiro and Keith’s late-night tryst. Denial that he felt anything for Keith beside lust, denial that a relationship with him might still be a viable option. Anger burns it up like a summer afternoon, scented with fire. 

 

James glares at Keith across the table at meetings, speaks to him only in short, monosyllabic statements. “Tie up that hair!” “No space wolves on the flight deck!” Keith doesn’t seem particularly put off by it. He probably doesn’t even notice, let alone care. He was only ever caught in Shiro’s orbit, no matter what James had managed to convince himself in his absence. 

 

It’s a crushing realization but a needed one. James’ desire was aimed at a concept. And an incredibly alluring face and unfairly attractive figure, to be fair. He could treasure Keith, he could try to make him happy, but he could never reach the same kind of effortless understanding that Shiro offered, easy as breathing. 

 

The greatest act of love is letting go. There had to exist at least a handful of 80’s ballads in that vein. James doesn’t know if what he felt for Keith was love, but he does know when he’s standing in the way of someone else’s happiness. Especially when it’s his own.   

 

He isn’t one to drink, particularly in light of the imminent threat to their planet, but that night he finds himself crammed in the storeroom turned makeshift bar with a smattering of Commanders and of age civilians. One drink can’t hurt, he tells himself. If anything, it might serve as the key element to lubricate his slide into acceptance. Finally clear his mind up for more important things like how to protect his friends and family from alien abduction. 

 

Shiro joins him at some point. James doesn’t notice until his half-finished beer is pried from his fingers and replaced with a glass of water. 

 

“I think you’ve had enough, Cadet.”

 

“I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough,” James slurs because he heard it in a movie once and it sounded cool. Like something someone would say if they were grizzled and wizened by the relentless current of life. James is neither, but a man can dream. 

 

“Do you need help getting to bed?”

 

It can’t be interpreted as anything but a thoughtful gesture and that pisses James off. He is willing to begrudgingly accept Shiro as a better match for Keith, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. It doesn’t mean he’s going to accept Shiro as an interruption to his fantasies with open arms. 

 

“You know, I don’t blame you,” James says because alcohol has dissolved any trace of a conversational filter. “There’s something about that...ssstupid mullet.”

 

“Mmhmm,” Shiro drawls. 

 

“And that little sound he makes? When you...when you pull it just right.”

 

“Alright, Cadet,” Shiro says, still light, still friendly, but bordered with an underlying warning. “That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about.”

 

“It's Officer! _Officer_!” James pounds his fist on the table.

 

“You’re drunk,  _ Cadet _ .” 

 

It’s an acknowledgment of some kind. The famously unflappable Shiro is taunting him. James entertains himself that Keith asked him here, that he noticed something was off and wanted to help, if only indirectly. Shiro has a good heart and he understands that prioritizing the needs of others is part and parcel of acting as a leader, but even he has limits. Like lending a helping hand to a partner’s former fuck buddy. It’s a hollow victory and probably a complete fabrication of James’ alcohol-addled mind, but it’s something. 

 

“You better not hurt him,” James says when Shiro helps him hobble back to the gym. He’s feeling wistful, from the beer, from the knowledge that this is really the end of imagining he and Keith could be anything more than fantasy. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”

 

Shiro is quiet for a few paces, then he laughs, loud and raucous. James doesn’t get the joke, but the sound of his unrestrained laughter drills into James’ brain and makes him want to punch Shiro. Just a little bit.  

 

“You think I won’t?”

 

Shiro holds a finger to his lips. He helps James to bed and pulls the blanket up to his chin. “I’m glad Keith has a friend who cares,” he whispers.

 

James doesn’t reply. He draws in a long breath, holds it till he hears the squeak of Shiro leaving the gym, then lets it eke from his lips like a deflated balloon. 

 

He hates Keith. 

 

But staring at the ceiling, watching the darkness above his cot spin into a dizzy nebula of black and purple, he decides he hates Shiro more. 

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://youremarvelous.tumblr.com/)


End file.
